Chapter 3
A week after the drill episode, I went back to Jesse’s with an odd sense of purpose. For once, I had a solid idea of what we were going to do.
“Pony Lessons”, as I’d started mentally calling them, seemed easy enough. Just to be certain—under guise of “babysitting some cousins over the holidays”—I’d asked Ponyville’s elementary schoolteacher for tips on teaching friendship to socially stunted foals.
“It really just boils down to building on what’s already there,” Cheerilee had answered. “They know how to ask their parents for what they want; just sometimes, a few of the late bloomers need reminders about empathy and courtesy.”
Which, really, had sounded exactly like what Jesse needed. I couldn’t quite mention its source to him, but Cheerilee’s advice had been a good foundation for building my own lessons.
At Jesse’s home, once I began my descent on the entrance elevator, I went over the two activities I’d brought supplies for. Today, we were going to start off by eating lunch and playing a game afterwards.
Easy, right?
However, in what had to be some sort of new record for him, Jesse managed to throw me for an awkward, confusing loop before the elevator’s doors even opened. Even after the hexagon hissed open to let me off, I stayed on the light disc for a few moments to try and process what was standing in front of me.
My gut reaction had been to ask the tall, black alicorn who he was, but his fiery-blue eyes were a dead giveaway. That only led me to wonder how Jesse had managed to turn himself into a gaudy-looking alicorn, but I swallowed that question, too. He’s making an effort, I told myself, even if it was misguided and… black, like the color of bad teenage poetry.
“Do you like it?”
I bobbed my head from side to side, not wanting to explicitly nod or shake my head. “It’s… a good start, Jesse. But slate-black is a little… garish? Like, you’d stand out.”
Alicorn Jesse still wore the same blank expression he usually did. I was torn between being comforted and creeped out; all he asked was, “So?”
“Well…” I pulled from my lessons I’d been planning all week. “If you stick out like that, ponies are going to be afraid of you, and that’s just going to make things more challenging.”
Jesse’s horn lit up, and with a flash of blue light, his coat turned a more neutral mustard yellow. “Better?”
I nodded. “Yeah. But you’re still kind of tall, and there’s only like eight alicorns in all of Equestria… maybe go for a more… normal unicorn?”
Another flash of light, and suddenly, I was staring into a mirror—except the mint green unicorn in front of me had blue eyes, not golden ones. My heart caught in my chest and my breathing picked up as I remembered being captive in a mine after being roped into a stupid wedding I didn’t even want to go to in the first place… I shook all of that out of my head. Frustration filled in its place: “Come on, Jesse, now you’re just messing with me.”
“Fine…” he rolled my eyes and responded in my voice—or at least, how I sounded on phonograph recordings. It was weird. With yet another flash of light, a hazel-colored unicorn stallion stood in front of me, short enough to be eye level.
I nodded. “That’s… yeah, that’s great.”
Pony Jesse nodded back. “I’m glad it’s up to your specifications. Now what?”
It took a moment to get my bearings; after realizing we were back to where I’d wanted to start—though I hadn’t planned on him transforming himself—I drew from my plans again. “Uh… first lunch, and then something fun.”
His eyes darted off to the side, thinking. “So, eating? I know the place for that.”
I got a good look at his flank when he turned around—mainly, I focused on the cutie mark he’d given himself. I reeled at the philosophical implications of that, but I caught myself in time to ask a more neutral, “Jesse… why’s your cutie mark… a fist? A human fist?”
Jesse turned his head to look at his flank, then at mine, then to my eyes. “Why’s yours a harp?”
His question caught me off guard to the point where I wondered, Did I tell him this before? “Uh… it’s a lyre,” I corrected. “And when I was ten, I spent an afternoon exploring my grandparents’ basement.” I smiled, thinking back to that day—my first archaeological expedition, complete with excitement and discovery. “When I was done, I went upstairs, and my mom was all excited; I had a picture of Grandma’s lyre for a cutie mark.” I puffed out my chest a little. “That’s when I knew I wanted to spend my life as an archaeologist, finding pieces of the past to tell a story of ancient cultures.”
Jesse’s bemused smirk deflated my childhood pride. “That’s a fairly flimsy basis for determining a vocation, is it not?” he asked. “I mean, if your flank tattoo is related to your passion, couldn’t you just as easily have been a musician?”
Instead of glowering at “flank tattoo”, I answered with another childhood anecdote: “I suck at playing the lyre. And the harp. And basically every other string instruments. Besides, it’s not what your cutie mark is, but how you get it, really.”
“So, are you saying it doesn’t matter what mine is, just as long as it holds some symbolic value for me?”
“I… no.” I shook my head. “You can’t just make one for yourself. You’ve got to earn it.”
Like a switch, Jesse’s tiny grin flipped off, and he swept a hoof around. “This facility is all that remains to stand testament to thirty billion lives that evaporated in an instant, and I have worked to restore it for longer than your race has been aware of itself.” He glared at me, somehow managing to maintain a looming presence despite being eye-level. “Is that enough to deserve an effigy of my dead race?”
I nodded, slowly, and swallowed. “Y… you can keep the fist.”
“Thank you for your permission.” He turned around began walking away from the elevator.
I noted that, for someone who usually walked on two legs, he was fairly graceful as a pony. When I realized he was leading me somewhere, I snapped back to my senses and jogged to catch up with him.
Once we were side-by-side, I could see out the corner of my eye that his usual, flat mouth was curled in a slight snarl. As we walked in angry silence, I tried to think of an apology that would actually mean something to him.
A few hallways later, Jesse beat me to the punch. “I shouldn’t have taken that out on you. You’re trying to help.”
I didn’t feel he needed to apologize, but I was glad he did, anyway. I replied with, “I’m sorry, too. I… It’s hard, I guess, to remember all you’ve been through. You don’t really talk about you all that much, so it’s less like you’re someone with a life and memories, and more like you’re … a constant force of nature.”
He chuckled, which almost sounded like a cough. “Just remember, if you’re building any statues, my favorite color is blue.”
I returned his dry chuckle, and things between us went silent again. We walked a new path, so I took mental note of which directions we took through through intersections. Everything in those hallways looked nearly identical, so if I ever needed to find my way back to the entrance elevator, my only way to do it would be by remembering which turns I’d taken.
With one final turn, Jesse and I entered a relatively short hallway; about a hundred feet from the intersection, it ended at a wide hexagonal door. Its flat bottom looked at least three times as wide as the rest of the doors in Jesse’s home; another difference was how it had black lettering stenciled onto its metal face.
At end of the hallway, Jesse lit up his horn, and the two halves of the door split apart to reveal a dark, foreboding expanse.
“Uh…” I protested. The pitch-black room reminded me how we were several miles underground. I was an archaeologist, sure, but that didn’t mean I was keen on entering into new places where I couldn’t see where I was going.
“You have your little rock, right?”
I nodded and brought my torchstone out of my right saddlebag. Jesse plucked it out of my own magic grip; when he lit it, it shone so bright that I worried the little thing might shatter. It held itself together, though, so the two of us had a light source as we walked into the room.
In front of us, massive rows of tall metal tables stretched from left to right, from one end of the light to the other. Everything else was hidden behind a veil of pitch black. The air didn’t smell any different than the recycled air in the rest of the facility, but the stillness and the echoes of hoofsteps gave that place a genuine cave-like quality.
“The cafeteria.” Jesse’s booming words sounded tiny in the room. He floated my torchstone over the nearest table to us before turning to me. “As good a place as any to eat?”
“Yeah.” I walked over to the table and its neck-high steel chairs. I’d barely thought of how difficult it was going to be to climb up on one when the legs of two chairs and the square section of the table between them glowed blue. With a popping sound, the table bent down like rubber, forming a lower segment; similarly, the chairs shrank down to pony size.
Jesse walked under the still-normal-height part of the table to the right of what he’d made for us, and I sat down on the chair on my side. Once we were both sitting, I opened my saddlebag and took out the lunch I’d packed for us—salad, sandwiches, juice, and for dessert, home-baked cookies.
I started to divvy up the paper plates and plastic utensils; Jesse’s eyes followed everything as he observed. Once I set his side of the table for him, he levitated one of his utensils up to his face and stared at it, pensively.
“It’s called a fork.” I nodded with a grin.
He ignored me, which I was used to; however, his sense of enthrallment was new. I figured it had to do something with our two cultures’ knack for similar solutions to problems—for example, we both had pieces of furniture we sat on, albeit different shapes.
My train of thought led me to a curious point: “So… what kind of utensils do you usually eat with?”
“I don’t.” He still sounded far off.
I blinked. “You… use your hands?”
Jesse finally broke out of his thought and stared at me like I’d asked a dumb question.
Instead of dwelling on the lack of conversation—we’d work on that during the meal—I took the lid off my salad container and served myself. After that, I passed the dish over to Jesse, who both picked it up and forked it onto his plate with magic.
I sighed and braced myself for the first correction of what I knew was going to be many. “Uh… lesson one: In mixed company, it’s considered more polite to use your hooves, like everyone else.”
The container sank down to the table, and Jesse raised his hooves. “How am I supposed to grip anything with these?”
“Like this…” I picked up my fork with my right hoof.
To his credit, Jesse did try to pick his fork up with a hoof. He got more and more frustrated—images of volcanoes came to mind—until finally, he blew out a hot sigh. His horn lit up and his hooves glowed; when he touched his fork, it stuck to his hoof like a magnet. “Are chaos-based shortcuts acceptable?”
My stomach froze, and my mind raced. “Wait, you… Chaos? Like… Discord?”
Jesse’s eyes narrowed as he raised one eyebrow. “What?” He rapidly twitched his head from side to side. “Chaos…” His horn lit up, and the salad container once again lifted off the table. “One of the fundamental forces of the universe, named due to its volatile and random nature—unless channeled through an appropriate medium.”
I craned my neck to the side. That wasn’t the term for it, but the definition definitely sounded textbook-familiar. “Wait… are you talking about magic?”
His face lit up in a joyous grin. “Your civilization calls it magic? That’s adorable!”
I glared, like how I did when he used to pet me. “Hey…”
Jesse raised his hooves—with his fork still attached to one—in mock surrender. “Sorry.”
After I accepted his apology with a quick shrug, we started on our first lunch together. The first few bites were quiet, just like a normal meal; I slowed down when I noticed Jesse was clearly forcing down each swallow. I admired his perseverance, but I didn’t want him to rush himself and get sick. “Uh… how’s the salad?”
“It’s food.” He tried to set his fork down next to his plate, but it stuck to his hoof. After glaring down at it, Jesse looked back up at me. “I haven’t eaten in a while. It is apparently difficult.”
I grinned. “You should eat more often, then.”
“Why?”
His question raised a slew of implications, but I didn’t quite know where to start with them. Several moments of silence hung between us, so I explained things more explicitly. “Next lesson: Usually ponies talk about stuff while eating. Like things that’re going on in their lives.”
Jesse flipped his fork hoof over, gesturing me to go first.
“So… I’ll go first, then.” I cleared my throat. “I’m in my third year of a graduate program at Canterlot University. I’ve already got my degree in history, specializing in archaeology.” I looked up, motioning at the light above our table, and Jesse actually laughed at my little joke.
If I hadn’t known any better, I’d say it sounded normal.
Thinking of college jogged my memory for a moment. “And actually… speaking of CU, I’ve actually got to do the lecture requirements for my degree plan over the next few weeks. So… it might be harder for me to get back here to help you with stuff.”
“Duly noted.” Jesse nodded. After a few seconds, I leaned my head forward and mirrored his upturned-hoof, motioning that it was his turn to talk.
He took a deep breath and began, “Drill operations are continuing at near-optimum efficiency, though it’s beginning to reach critical depth—”
“No, no, no…” I interrupted, shaking my head. He looked at me, annoyed, so I explained, “I mean, drill stuff is good to know, but what else is going on in your life? Surely you take breaks sometime; what do you during those?”
He swept his hoof at me, then the food.
“Every day at sunrise—which I’ve programmed into this facility to be at six hundred hours—I do daily inspections on the various systems that keep me alive and this facility running—I guess you could say I ‘eat’ during that time, but if you knew what that entailed, you’d probably challenge that definition. After that, I have three three-hour cycles that I alternate between.” Jesse started tapping his forelimb with his hoof to count them off: “Maintenance theory, where I learn how to rebuild the next step in my plan. Tactical probing, which should be intuitively obvious. And personal enrichment, where I do things like honing my ‘magic’, as you call it, so I don’t accidentally break anything I’ve rebuilt. I do practical maintenance throughout the night, up until an hour before sunrise. During that time, I document everything I did that day.”
I blinked a few times. Before I could even process all of that, I blurted out, “Forget fun, when do you sleep?”
All I got in reply was a mirthless chuckle. “I spent a lifetime asleep, what good does that do anybody now?”
“But you’ve got to sleep!”
“You speak with certainty…” He put his hooves on the table and stared. “How can you? Is the whole point of this not that you don’t know me as much as you wish you did?”
His accusation cut deep. “The whole point, if you’re calling it that, is because it’s like you’ve been underground so long, you’ve forgotten how to live.”
Jesse looked back at me, and I had a hard time reading his face. It wasn’t neutral like it usually was; instead it looked like I’d said something deeply offensive. I braced for the repercussions of that, but before I could say anything to soften the blow, Jesse shook his head and his ears drooped, weirdly. “Do you know why I devote an hour a day to documenting what I did?”
I looked back and, finally, shook my head back at him.
“Human bodies were never meant to be immortal.” He looked down at his hoof; finally, his horn glowed and his fork dropped off. “Or as chaos conduits. I won’t explain things to you because I can’t.”
For a moment, it looked like he was pleading with me.
“I don’t know what happened, specifically, to turn me into this. I don’t eat. I don’t tire. But all of that is built on an underlying, imperfect, biological structure. There are shortcomings…” He tapped his head. “My guess is that there is only physically enough connections to store approximately two centuries’ worth of memories. If I don’t document my endeavors, I will forget them; it’s only a matter of time.”
The word “time” resonated through the cavern-like cafeteria, and it made me feel a deeper pity than I’d ever felt for another living being. I’d always assumed that Jesse was old, but I’d also guessed he’d also gained some eons-old wisdom, like a dragon or the princesses.
I looked down at my plate as a deeper realization struck: “You’re going to forget me, one day, aren’t you?”
“Yes and no.” I looked back up at Jesse, and he shrugged. “I’ve written a few notes about you in my journal, which goes back almost to the beginning of all this. That was a hard lesson to learn; even data fades away after a few decades.” He looked down at his left hoof and flipped it over a few times. “So, I’ll know who you are until I’m finished with my plan, certainly.” His eyes rose from his hoof to stare at me. “But after a while, you’ll just be a stranger in my notes; someone I’ve never met.”
It all gave me a feeling of tiny, insignificant helplessness. I stifled a bitter laugh at my own stupidity—here, I was trying to teach Jesse how to be a pony? He’d obviously just been humoring me the whole time. More likely than not, we’d eventually go our separate ways, he’d continue on with his plan, and nothing would have mattered in the end.
I shook my head and pushed my plate away. I was done with lunch.
“For what it’s worth, I enjoyed… this.”
His words perked my spirits up a little, but it didn’t stop me from cleaning up. Jesse didn’t need food, and I’d been naïve in thinking I could change anything about him. Once everything was put away—I’d brought a trash bag with me, since I didn’t know how Jesse handled refuse—I stopped. I didn’t know what to do next.
Almost like he could read minds, Jesse asked, “Is that it for today?”
Dejectedly, I nodded.
“I thought you mentioned something fun after lunch.”
Inside, I balked. Oh, you remember that. All I said was, “Oh yeah…” To complete the illusion, I widened my eyes a little as I looked down at my saddlebags.
“You’re upset, and a terrible liar.”
I rolled my head back to lock eyes with Jesse—not fast enough to snap at him, but he’d definitely crossed a line. “That’s because this is pointless. You’re not learning anything, you’re not gaining anything, this has crap-to-do with your plan…” I shook my head. “This is just cute to you, getting to watch a little pony who thinks it knows how to act civilized!”
He stared back at me. “Why would I jeopardize your wellbeing like that?”
I huffed. “Because you either don’t know you’re doing it, or you don’t care… And I don’t know which is worse.”
“Again, I respect you too much to waste your time just to find some sort of intrinsic humor in it.” Jesse shrugged, and his expression darkened. “You are intelligent enough to have your own life and schedule, and if you insist on thinking the worst of me, you should at least know you’re useful to me. From there, I’ll extrapolate and repeat: why would I jeopardize your wellbeing, when it wastes my time to needlessly hurt you?”
“So you’re saying this hasn’t been a waste of both of our times?”
“I already told you, I enjoyed this.” Without breaking eye contact, he motioned at his torso. “I’ve told you more about myself—despite how there really isn’t much to speak about. Was that not the point of this? To be less like coworkers and more like friends?”
Most of my frustration boiled off at that; but some of my skepticism lingered. “You want to be friends now?”
“No.”
I nodded, not sure of what I’d expected.
Jesse crossed his hooves. “It’s not that I dislike you. But when you began coming here more and more, I reviewed my logs to see if there was any precedence for that sort of thing. There was. For seven decades, I visited a nearby town to spend my evenings with one of the residents. That ended with a single entry of, ‘Funeral today’. After a three-month gap, the logs resume; however, I no longer visited the surface for anything other than supplies-gathering and defending the entrances to this facility.”
It was all so clinical and matter-of-fact, but Jesse’s story made sense. Whether he was doing it intentionally, or even if he couldn’t remember why, I could see why Jesse had learned to distance himself from anyone who he’d outlive.
I’d heard of a lot of legends about long-lived beings who went insane because of that, too.
“Okay.” I sighed. “So you’re kind of… distant, because of that.” I looked him square in the eye. “Can you at least promise me you’ll try to be more friendly while I’m helping you?”
“Despite how that logically ends?”
I swallowed. “Start small. Make one friend, then another, then dozens…” I grinned, remembering the one and only time I’d been honored to attend a meal with Princess Celestia. I’d just finished a history report on an ancient pegasus city, which somehow made it into her hooves. We’d spent most of lunch talking about what life there had really been like, and some of her friends who used to live there. Her words, when I’d asked about the same thing Jesse and I were talking about, had been: “You’ll still feel the loss, but it is infinitely easier to bear it with friends at your side.”
“Perhaps,” Jesse agreed. After a moment he nodded. “Okay, then. I’ll try to be more open. At least to the point where you don’t need to invent motives for my actions.”
I chuckled, weakly. “Sorry for—”
“No.” He shook his head. “There’s nothing you could have done better given your operating knowledge. I’m sorry for putting you in that situation in the first place.”
I accepted his apology with a nod. A few moments of silence passed, and then I shrugged and snapped open my other saddlebag. In it, I’d brought a chessboard that folded like a box to hold all of the pieces.
When it levitated on top of the table, Jesse leaned forward with wide eyes. “This… this was a human game.”
I didn’t think he was lying, but his statement definitely had profound implications. Sure, we shared things like tables and doors—which were for “keeping things organized”, really—but something as complex as a game?
I raised my eyebrow at a much more pressing point: “Do you even remember human games?”
He shook his head. “It’s not a memory, more like… a glimpse, like it’s on the tip of my tongue.” His horn lit up, the board split open, and all the pieces floated to the board.
I grinned, stunned, when I looked over the board; he’d only mixed up the knights and bishops, but I’d had to re-learn the placements of all the pieces when I first joined Canterlot University’s chess team. With a new point of data to analyze, that meant…
I shook away analysis for a moment. Instead, we played. After the first twelve games, Jesse and I were at nine-three; after the first few games, I hit a wall and spent the remaining time being crushed. I spent the whole time smiling—across eons and two cultures, without any sort of real coaching, it was nothing short of amazing for us to share something like that.
Mentally, I reminded myself to start with the game next time.
We took a break after game thirteen, where Jesse’s win streak hit the double digits. He declined the sandwich I offered him, but I did the math. Assuming ten minutes per game for thirteen games, it’d definitely been long enough for me to be as hungry as I was.
Halfway through my sandwich, an alarm blasted, loud enough to rattle the pieces on the table. I freaked out, since it definitely sounded like something was wrong, at so many miles below the earth’s surface.
Across the table, Jesse smiled. Between the explosive blarings of the alarm, he explained, “The drill… found what… it’s looking… for.”
The two of us stood up; as sad as I was to end our games, he had work to do. Jesse’s horn lit, and after a flash of light, his usual lab coat and pants materialized. One more flash of light, and he was in them, wearing his usual human shape.
He pulled something small out of his lab coat’s inner chest pocket, held it up, and pressed a button. The alarm stopped, and my ears rang. “I didn’t think the alarm would be that…”
Jesse froze, wearing a panicked expression. A trash can flashed into existence on the floor in front of him, and he knelt down in front of it before violently throwing up in it.
I fought to keep my lunch down—I was definitely a sympathy puker. Fortunately, Jesse finished quickly and sent the trash can back to wherever it had come from. Instead of standing up, he sat on his heels, oddly at eye-level with me and wearing a sheepish grin. “Next time… just bring the game.”
I nodded and began packing up the board. Before I closed it, Jesse stood up and grabbed two of the pieces—the black king and the white queen. He clenched one in each fist, and after I smelled something burning, he held one hand out to me.
Inside his charred palm was a chess queen, except this one was made of a clear crystal—diamond, if I knew anything about Jesse’s consistency.
“You have your lectures, right?”
“Yeah.” I nodded up at him now.
“Keep this; it will let me tell you when I need you again.” He put his own piece, a now-diamond king, in his lab coat.
I put away the rest of the chess set—noting I’d have to buy some replacement pieces—and packed it in my saddlebag. Jesse held out a hand, and my torchstone floated back down to me. I took it and held on to it; we still needed it to see.
Since we were done with everything, I assumed I’d have to find my own way back to the elevator. That was usually how things usually ended—me, getting dismissed from the maintenance room.
That afternoon, Jesse surprised me by taking me all the way back to the entrance elevator. I grinned up at him, and I sincerely hoped that he was serious about making an effort to be more open and friendly.
I stepped forward onto the light disc and waved. “See you in a few weeks, Jesse.”
He waved back at me as the glass hexagon doors closed. “Goodbye, Lyra.”
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That is all.
pretty awesome dude, this is totally worth anyones time.
Interesting in that he wasn't as cold and detached in chapter 2. Either he's relearning emotions or the pony persona shows more social cues that a human guise simple cannot replicate (ear movement, tail swishing, coat twitches, etc). It was kind of funny that he would select a mainly black themed alicorn to start with like any bad cliched pony OC.
I really wonder what happened to the humans now. 30 billion gone *poof*. Wonder if it was some magic doomsday spell...
Celestia could probably show him a few pointers on how to deal with mortals on a daily basis and not go insane as the ones you get attached to keep dying. Then again, I wonder how he and Discord will react to each other. While it's not spelled out implicitly, Discord seems to be far older than the Princesses.
this is a very good fic. please continue.
3835343 Problem is, quite a few of them become their anti-particles in the process...
First teleport using this concept: about 35 kg of antimatter result. World asplodes. The End!
I enjoy these frequent updates.
This is really fascinating. I really don't know where its going and I love that. Keeps me hanging onto every word to glean a bit more info to put a picture together.
Great job. I'll be back for more, thank you.
He tapped his head. “My guess is that there is only physically enough connections to store approximately two centuries’ worth of memories. If I don’t document my endeavors, I will forget them; it’s only a matter of time.”
Your presumption that humans can only remember 200 years worth of data is based on a hell of a lot of suppositions without any support. Not to mention badly outdated information..... We don't even know HOW the brain stores information, much less how much it can hold. The LOW estimate is for 100 terabytes of information... based on the number of neural connections in the average brain. (one connection assumed to equal 1 bit.) However, neurons can exist in more than one phase-- we're analog, not digital. Further analysis of Northwestern University psychologist Paul Reber argues that it's much higher.
" ... neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes [1 petabyte ≈ 1,000 terabytes]. For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage. "
That is, if we stored data as inefficiently and uncompressed as a VCR. Long info short, we have a staggering memory capacity-- and the estimate only grows the longer we examine the brain. With a merely human brain, your human should have enough memory capacity for thousands of years. Plus, we sort memories by importance... chucking repetitive or irrelevant data, archiving what is precious.
That's setting aside the fact that, as technologically advanced as this human is, he should have countless means for expanding and upgrading the memory capacity of his brain....
Oh my frikkin' god. I haven't read this yet, but...
I just finished reading the first two chapters, favorited this and liked it and then went back to the main page, refreshed... New chapter, already with comments.
That's timing.
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Wait a sec, Alondro, I thought I heard they already teleported a gas particle across a river with quantum entanglement successfully. If they had the instruments to determine it was the same particle, if they turn antimatter, shouldn't they have detected an explosion instead? I'm not saying you're a liar, I'm just confused here.
I'm interested enough to look forward to what happens next, and I hope (from the positive reception of your other stories) that you're a good enough writer to keep this from turning into the painful Sue-fest that most HiE's on this site devolve into.
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It's a minor story point in a story with honest-to-god magic, just go with it. Unless you actually think this is/should be hard sci-fi, in which case, uh, OK then. Good on you.
On the other hand, that's interesting information about research into memory storage, I don't really keep up with the journals in biological areas. I do wonder where Dr. Reber is getting those numbers, though. Last I heard, the human brain was thought to store information holographically, rather than sequentially, which isn't really representable in units of binary storage.
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And I see the angry comment of someone who thinks all this technology needs to have blueprints. I mean, "stars" need fuel, clearly, so it's possible that limited fuel reserve lasted long enough for one person to repair and rebuild the giant freaking geothermal power station (among other things).
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And you answer your own question with:
Is it possible that a human can only hold memories for a certain amount of time? Old people do seem to forget over time, let alone a millenia-old person who probably contextually processes days like we would hours...
More importantly, (at both of you), there's something called "willing suspension of disbelief". Meaning, if it's remotely plausible (fission reactors running out of fuel, people forgetting things over time), just go with it. This is my story, I had a lot of fun writing it, and if you don't agree with some of my artistic liberties, there are literally thousands of other stories on this site you might like better—I suggest trying one of those.
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Yeah, someone should pay him to finish chapter 11...
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I'm going to try for nightly chapter updates.
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Thank you.
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Aww yiss... more Daft Punk...
30 billion seems pretty high. It's not "unrealistic" given the super futuristic advanced chaos/magic using human race, but on the other hand there seems to be a trend of more industrialized populations having a lower birthrate, and right now I believe we're looking at leveling off around 10 billion or so. There could be any number of reasons humanity's population underwent another major boom, I guess.
TL;DR 30 billion is a number high enough to make me wonder how it got that high, but it's your story and if there's a reason for that number then there's no reason you shouldn't use it.
Why am I getting the feeling that the ending to this story will be a tear jerker?
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Yeah, Alondro, I don't want to start another argument, but A) stars need fuel, B) they need HEAVY containment and C) even with the ridiculous actual energy present, harvesting it is hard enough that we still haven't created fusion reactors that can break even. It seems incongruous, but, honestly, harnessing the energy from a fusion reactor without melting a good chunk of complex is insanely difficult. By comparison, magma-based energy is simple.
Also, again, I don't want to start another argument, but we really haven't discovered what I would venture is at least 90% of science, even if it's mostly finnicky stuff and engineering stuff. Michio Kaku, when I was present at one of his lectures, said that discovering another force is very unlikely, but unless we're counting gravity and dark energy (which is a horrible, misleading name, but it's essentially repulsion caused by lack of mass, for anyone who doesn't know) as the same force, I think we just recently did, so, honestly, Chaos as an energy type doesn't surprise me that much. Heck, sound isn't even really an energy of its own, and it's super duper important and powerful, even if it's powerful in ways we take for granted. It doesn't necessarily have to be a new force, it can just be a new interaction of an existing force. Maybe, for instance, pumping electricity through a certain alloy produces anomalous effects. Pumping electricity through gases can get you goddamn lasers, I don't see why it's so unlikely that other interactions could exist.
All else failing, I'm just going to go with "the purpose of almost all stories is escapism, and if you're looking to read stories with no holes in theory, plot or physics, go write your own." I don't generally take the stance of non-artists can't criticize, but it's not the easiest thing to create a story that's watertight, airtight, plot-tight, etc. In the interest of not creating another comment war, I'm going to just go out and say I won't respond to any further discussion on this page unless the author is fine with us discussing finnicky points of physics on his page.
3835959 how does that matter in any way, shape, or form. I don't want to bring you down buddy, but it's friggin' fiction. There's no need for lectures without citation or anything else, just read and enjoy.
These daily updates make me very happy.
And Im enjoying the hell out of this
Your title is incredibly misleading, this story is NOT in fact about Daft Punk in Equestria.
I have a tendancy to use big fonts, so well.... THIS STORY IS FUCKING AWESOME
I just realized this is a Warhammer40k crossover... at least I hope I'm right. Things got a little more interesting.
3836579 Solar power.
(Alondro wins)
3836579 Sound consists of pressure waves at various frequencies and amplitudes.
Chaos is NOT an energy form nor a force, it is a functional result of the principles of entropy and quantum effects.
It doesn't make sense for chaos to be a form of energy outside of a realm of magic.
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I've sent a message to you in an effort to move this off this author's story page. If anyone's interested in the logs for whatever reason, shoot me a PM and if it's not a whole long time in the future or very shortly I should have them.
Well... I have to say that this, combined with the story's title and certain other hints in previous chapters, gives me suspicions.
Of course, I kinda had said suspicions right off the bat because I admittedly have been hoping for a story to go the route that I think this story is going...
In other words, what I think is happening might be only wishful thinking on my part.... But there seems to be a number of hints that support my initial suspicions... Though again, I might be seeing things that aren't there due to said wishful thinking... Hmm...
And I know that the whole memory thing is for story purposes and such, but I have to agree with 3835959 on this bit:
Well I'm definitely interested in seeing where this goes!
3835959
I entirely agree.
The only intelligent conclusion is that the human brain can store more information than even the oldest person in all of human history.
This even includes the oldest man according to Bible accounts -which people usually dismiss as impossible fiction-, Methuselah, who is written to have lived to the age of 969 years.
Aside from bible accounts, there is also the case of Li Ching-Yuen, who was purportedly 197 years old.
At his death, his thoughts were still clear and sharp.
As well, some believe that his memory was so clear, he may have had an Idetic memory (or in la-mans terms, photographic memory).
Eyewitness accounts repeatedly and consistently provide ample evidence to this being factual, with many families who lived in the same area stating Li Ching-Yuen was a grown man when their grandparents were young children.
This too is often dismissed, as there was little call for written records in the late 1600's.
What few there were, no documentation remains to prove he told the truth about his age.
Haha, oh wow, gotta love everyone in the comments arguing about the scientific accuracy of a My Little Pony fanfiction.
Have I yet said how much I love subversions? It's pretty cool seeing Lyra practically say "shitty OC!" as soon as she sees his alicorn form.
3835959 You could have put that more nicely, but you are correct. From what we know of the human brain, it's not unreasonable to say that it is like a computer that's always upgrading itself.
That being said, we must take into account what the author calls Chaos. Perhaps it is taxing to his brain, limiting his ability to retain information?
I'm not sure how much you base your story on real science, but scientists speculate, that human mind can store up to millennium of 'life', before overwriting it. Just this tip.
PS. I don't know who, or what he is, so that could not apply.
3839888 Same shit happened with Star Trek!!
But what that tells us is that there's something very, very compelling about these stories that we end up wanting to make them real.
Good writers making good stories about strong characters with realistic flaws facing real problems while trying to find logical solutions---and doing it between all the commericals. What's not to like?